San Francisco 49ers to debut state-of-the-art Levi's Stadium (w/video)
Resembling sun-bleached bones of a colossal whale, the white steel ribs of Levi’s Stadium jut 200 feet skyward from the sidewalk on Tasman Street in Santa Clara, where the San Francisco 49ers will kick off their first home game at 1 p.m. Sunday.
The $1.3 billion house that Jed York built in the heart of Silicon Valley, three blocks from networking giant Cisco Systems headquarters, is 38 miles south of the football team’s aged and abandoned facility, Candlestick Park, on an isolated, windswept point on San Francisco Bay.
What’s inside the new 1.85 million-square-foot football palace -more than five times the size of the Graton Resort & Casino in Rohnert Park - is light years apart from Candlestick, the 54-year-old stadium where the 49ers played ball from 1971 through last year.
With a national Monday Night Football television audience tuned in Dec. 19, 2011, Candlestick suffered two power failures, the second one creating a 30-minute game delay and dimming The City’s image.
Brightening Levi’s Stadium will be a mix of LED and conventional lights, twin scoreboards that total more than 19,000 square feet and 1,162 solar panels generating 515,000 kilowatts of electricity a year, enough to power the Niners’ 10 home games and qualify them as a “net neutral” team.
The new sports and entertainment emporium, already a major Bay Area visitor attraction with a museum and daily tours open to the public, is digitally super-wired; sustainable, with a climate-moderating “green roof” and use of 85 percent recycled water, and gastronomically hip with a spate of vegan and vegetarian offerings, international foods and standards like burgers, oven-fired pizza and nachos.
More than 400 miles of data cable run through the stadium, including 70 miles serving 1,200 Wi-Fi antennas that put every one of the 68,500 seats within 10 feet of a Wi-Fi signal box. Internet bandwidth is 40 gigabytes per second, 40 times more than any known U.S. stadium, the 49ers say.
“I was impressed,” said Kevin Hughes, a former Rohnert Park resident who toured the stadium Thursday with his wife, Pam. “I had a full set of reception bars on my phone,” said Hughes, who used to work in Silicon Valley and now lives near Pomona.
Eyeballing the ground layout from atop the stadium’s Suite Tower, Hughes said he was pleased to see three wide bridges from the parking lots, a big improvement over Candlestick’s lone bridge, a crowd choke point.
Pam Hughes endorsed the Levi’s Stadium mobile app that helps people find their way around the place as well as order food from their seats for express pick-up at a concession stand or in-seat delivery.
“She’d be willing to pay the $5 (delivery fee) not to have to climb over people to get it,” Kevin Hughes said.
Told by their guide Thursday that the app will also identify the restroom with the shortest line, women in the Hughes’ tour group let out a collective murmur of approval. There are 1,135 toilets, 250 more than at Candlestick.
Near the start of the tour, about 40 people settled into the padded, cardinal-red seats in a lower-level club section near the 20-yard line. On the field, a man was laying white stripes on the emerald turf, every one of its Bandera Bermuda blades of grass seemingly in place.
“Uh huh, uh huh, this is good, right here,” said Judith Scott, one of nine women from Milpitas and San Jose who took the tour together. For the price - $350 per game after a $20,000 one-time personal seat license - the seats should be swell. A reporter found the gap between his knees and the next row’s seat backs was minimal.
Inside the Suite Tower, Gwen Johnson corrected one of the women who wondered about the price of a hot dog. “They don’t call them hot dogs here,” she said.
They’re called franks, they cost $6.25 and they’re naturally smoked, nitrate-, hormone- and antibiotic-free, steamed in a broth of local tomatoes and served on a custom-made bun from Le Boulanger. They’re among more than 180 menu choices, including more vegetarian and vegan (32) items than any other National Football League stadium, all prepared by an in-house entity called Centerplate and offered at more than 800 points of sale.
A bar area on the 50-yard line offers 42 varieties of beer, including a dozen local craft brews, and two California keg wines on tap.
But for all the stadium’s digital, edible and environmental assets, many of the people bound for Sunday’s game, or any other game, are worried about a more pedestrian matter: Gridlock.
Levi’s Stadium laid an egg on its test run, a Major League Soccer game that drew about 49,000 spectators on the evening of Aug. 2. Chronicle columnist Ann Killion said she was marooned on Tasman Street, needing an hour to move one mile. Light rail service was nightmarish and parking schemes muddled. Fred Vasquez of Windsor said there were no directions for the way out of overflow parking on a golf course.
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